But I stipulate at the outset that I will have no offensive superiority in my instructors. If I am to learn as a child I will be treated as a child. I will have no one caviling at me, for instance, because I do not know when Washington was born. I never did know when Washington was born, but I desire now to amend this my iniquity of ignorance, and I am even minded, if only my teachers will be patient, to plod on from the Revolution to the Civil War, and to learn the succession of battles thereof, and which side won them. I wish my instructors to understand that my humility of spirit needs no augmenting on their part. I wish them to be as sweetly patient and cheerily maternal as they would be to my daughter’s daughter. I wish my teachers to administer boundary lines but mildly, and to give me their minimum doses of mental arithmetic; for in mathematics and geography my mind is willing but weak. I think I could promise that patience in my instructors would have a reward in a proficiency of pupil such as they could never hope to win from the iniquitous immature, on whose preoccupied minds and thankless hearts they squander such devotion.
What a joyous picture it is, as I conjure it up, this going to school again! What happiness to slip out of our grown-up households, and go forth into the morning, with book-strap and luncheon in hand, to meet by the way our harried and over-busy acquaintance, men and women, some whiteheaded in ignorance, perhaps, all skipping and dancing along to the same glad place. Gleeful, we enter a sunny room with geraniums on the window-sill, bright maps on the wall, and a beautiful young lady at the desk. We are no longer hard and hardened children: our hearts as well as our intellects are softened by the debility of age, and we appreciate the graciousness of our instructor with the rose in her belt, the milk of human kindness in her eye, and the carefully preserved smile upon her lips. It is with responsive smiles of gratitude that we feel arithmetic and history and geography trickling into our craniums from the cranium of our teacher. Then, when she feels that, still willing, we are perhaps grown weary with well-doing, she gives a signal, and with one accord we raise our cracked voices in ecstatic, yet instructive song, in which perhaps we are poetically informed of some new fact about the firefly, or the green grass, or perhaps our own gastronomy, or in glittering phrase we unweave the rainbow into the colors of the spectrum. Or, to forestall the ennui resulting from our too earnest effort, our instructor bids us stretch our cramped, rheumatic limbs, and with graceful contortions of her lithe young body, directs us as we prance stiffly through a calisthenic exercise.
But it is not on these diversions that my fancy lingers most fondly, but on those more solid parts of our education. How happy I should be, for example, if I could only add, both in my head and on paper! How many bewildered and distrustful moments would thus be eliminated from my existence! And if to a proficiency in addition I superadded an adeptness in subtraction, then perhaps on some proud day might my opinion of the bulk of my bank account approximate more nearly the opinion of the cashier. And if my rudimentary bump of mathematics were carefully manipulated according to the newest system of educational massage, I might even progress as far as percentage. I might learn how to be richer if I could once understand the allurements of compound interest. So much depends on the attitude of mind that I wonder whether, if I approached fractions in a spirit of friendliness rather than of enmity to the knife, they would reward me by allowing me an entrance into their intricacies, so that I could with impunity buy things on the bias, or estimate the reduction by the dozen of merchandise that tags a half-cent to its price when purchased singly. There are, besides, other valuable facts to be gleaned from the study of arithmetic, the possession of which would be matter for gloating. How proudly I should proclaim to some ignorant companion of a country stroll the number of feet in a mile! I should be happy to know under all circumstances the number of ounces in a pound, grocer’s or apothecary’s: how exalted I should be if I knew the exact amount of a scruple, that being a fact of which I am sure most of my friends are ignorant. An exhaustive knowledge of weights and measures would not only entitle one to distinction among one’s acquaintance, but would open up many new avenues of interest in one’s daily life.
History is another of the subjects for which I hanker; not history as it is administered to me now, spiced for the mature palate, with philosophy and evolution, the ebb and flow of tendencies, but history for the infant mind, the bread and milk of history, as it were. I have sometimes thought that historic research would be easier for me if sometimes I knew what men did before I was forced to understand why they did it; and a simple statement of what the actual fact is under consideration would clarify for me much of the historian’s discussion of cause and effect. I have a distinct conception of the development of the great and glorious English people, but even such knowledge would be materially strengthened if I were able instantly to sort out all the Henrys and Edwards and stow them away in their proper cubby-holes among the embarrassment of decades. As to my own respected fatherland, I have discussed intelligently the growth of the spoils system, skipping from presidential term to presidential term with all a grown-up’s airy superiority; but ask me by whom and when and why North Carolina was colonized, or just what Captain John Smith was about when Pocahontas intercepted the executioner, and you have me. I want to study history at last fairly and squarely, out of a dapper little textbook that I can stow away handily in my brain, with fine fair outlines at beginning and end of it, and all important events made salient by heavy type, and a brisk brushing together of one’s information by a résumé after each chapter. Such a primer would greatly assist me in my study of the metaphysics of history.
Yet perhaps I do but hanker after impossibilities; perhaps this school I so happily image forth would refuse to teach me what I want to know. Possibly such information belongs only to the period of my negligent infancy. Perhaps my charming young teacher, exuding the wit and wisdom of the newest normal school, would refuse to stand and deliver the knowledge I long for. If I desired the facts of the French and Indian War, I might merely be set to building wigwams and drawing braves in war-paint with colored crayons on the blackboard. Perhaps after all there is nobody left who knows how to teach the things I have forgotten. For example, do they now acknowledge in the primary curriculum that fair, old-fashioned study called penmanship? I yearn to be put once more into a copybook. I long to set forth once more wise saws in round v’s and unquestioned e’s and i’s. My fingers long since became callous and conscienceless to distinguish t from l, b from p, and I wish somebody would reform the rascally old digits. It would be a great relief to my friends and myself if I could only become legible in my old age.
One branch of knowledge little emphasized in my youth, however, I could be sure of receiving at the hands of my fair instructress of to-day,—I refer to that varied information known as “nature-study.” I am greatly deficient in nature-study. I own to an unanalytical habit of mind as regards out-of-doors. So long as the wild flowers make a glory at my feet, I have never cared much to shred them into pistil and corolla and stamen. So long as the small fowls make me melody, I have never cared to know the color of their pinfeathers. But I would fain amend all this and die knowing something. I picture our band of eager grown-ups pouring over the countryside in the wake of our animated and instructive conductor,—peering into the grass to lay bare the soul in the sod, blinking our old eyes to discover the bird in his coverts, cocking our dull ears to classify the notes of his song. I see us disporting ourselves over the landscape, busily seeking some curious knowledge, and then scampering back to our teacher with treasure trove of leaf or flower or pebble or captured insect. Sweetly she commends our application, and explains the exact nature of our find. We swell with knowledge momentarily, and return to more prosaic tasks elate, having hung its proper label on blade and bush, bird and bough. What a satisfaction it would be, after having lived with nature for a lifetime in awesome ignorance, to feel that one had at last assailed her and ascertained her secrets!
As a young child, I must have been singularly limited in mental scope; I cannot otherwise explain my well-remembered aversion to geography. Those parti-colored maps streaked with inky rivers, and bordered by the wiggling lines of the Gulf Stream, filled me with loathing. The revolving globe, and that oft-repeated image which likens the earth to an orange flattened at the poles, seemed to me almost sickening. How bitterly do I repent my obstinacy! Besides, there is not one trace left now of my former aversion. In fact, geography appeals to me to-day as if it were a brand-new branch of study, so well did I succeed in not learning it as a child. I have tried ever since reaching maturity to make up my geographical deficiencies, but with small success. Often do I find myself relegated to the dunce-seat in the minds of the company present. Despite my constant effort, there are certain countries that always elude my grasp, notably Burma and New Zealand, and there is always for me an airy insubstantiality about the entire continent of South America. Within my own beloved country, certain rivers have a way of turning up in unexpected States when I supposed that they had long comfortably emptied themselves into the ocean; and there are some cities which always flit with agility to and fro across the map.
I wonder if my early antagonism to geography might perhaps have been due to a shrewd sense of its uselessness to me at that stage of my existence. Stay-at-home as I was, why trouble myself with strange lands until necessary? Yet I was lacking in foresight, and should be grateful now if only I had packed away some information against the day I should need it, whereas nowadays I find traveling without any knowledge of geography stimulating but inconvenient. This observation leads me to a broader one on the topsy-turvy nature of our present educational sequence: those studies most astute and useless we put in the college curriculum, and those most immediate and practical to the college graduate about to grapple with life, we relegate to the elementary school, where the children neither desire nor need to master them. I would suggest a turning about. Let the college youth and maid who will suffer from a lack of practical arithmetic learn to add a column accurately; let the irresponsible infant sport with trigonometry and conic sections. These subjects unlearned or forgotten, one could still go through life unfretted by the loss. So with other subjects forever lost to us because entrusted to the intelligence of careless infancy. I would teach geography and handwriting in the senior year at college, and put philosophy in the primary school. So would the young collegian go forth upon life well equipped, and not come to fifty years burdened with regrets for knowledge lost forever,—as I. I have kept afloat in higher mathematics, I have delved into the mines of science, I have trod air with many a prancing philosopher,—therefore who so well fitted as I to appreciate at last the peace of having a foundation!
IX
My Clothes
IN the dear, naughty memoirs of Madame de Brillaye, not inaptly named by the author the “Journal of a Wicked Old Woman,” you remember that scene in the pleasaunce at Château Vernot, where the turf was like fairy velvet and the trees were tortured into all manner of shapes unarboreal,—she liked to have her trees dressed, she said,—“There is something indecent in great naked branches sprawling the good God knows where.” The little old lady is sitting with her great, old-ivory cane across her knees; she rolls it back and forth with her little old-ivory hands, while she scolds Aimée—as always. Aimée has just come through that brisk little encounter of hers with de Brontignac, and seems to have allowed her raiment to look a little battle-worn. “Go dress yourself, baby,” cries Madame Great-Aunt. “Will you let your very laces whimper? Into your rose velvet brocade, and your chin will be jerked up as if by a string. Gowns have healed more hearts than they’ve ever broken: the second, men’s; the first, women’s. Now you think you have a soul; when you are my age, you will know that women are not souls, but dresses. I look back; my history is the history of my gowns; undressed, I do not exist; my clothes are myself.” (A few lines above I used the word “remember,” but merely for the sake of an effective start-off. Madame and her memoirs do not exist outside of this paragraph. I am not the first to perpetrate a spurious quotation; I am merely the first to confess it. To proceed.) It is not the first time that the little old de Brillaye has set me thinking. Is she true in this passage, or merely epigrammatic? If my history is the history of my clothes, let me so study it out, formulate, as it were, the meditations of the pupa upon its successive integumenta. Yet the figure is infelicitous. In fact, the chrysalis image is not over-pretty as regards this side of eternity: pupa suggests the pulpy tenantry of the chestnut; this worminess may be liturgical, but it is unpleasant, is opposed to that sociability with one’s self which makes life entertaining; there is nothing chat-worthy in a worm. Be it granted me to regard these accidental rags of lawn or wool or silk I find adherent, these hardly less transitory hands and feet, this hardly more durable incasing occipital, not as a worm incarcerate, but with the detachment and uplift of the incipient butterfly.